Claire Perry [SFW] is England’s Net Nanny who, over the past few months, has pushed that country’s disastrous bid to censor the Internet through to the highest levels. Hackers defaced her primitive website, adding some racy photos alongside her smiling mug.
A blogger named Paul Staines – who goes by Guido Fawkes, and who is, in his own way, somewhat odious – took a bit of pleasure in the defacement and so Perry, not understanding the Internet, plead the Sol Rosenberg defense and began threatening to sue everybody and get Staines sacked from the Sun. Now Staines is about to warn Perry for defaming him publicly. The Ministry Of Truth has collected the exchange in this Storify.
What we see here is trolling to the nth degree and, more important, an MP with little understanding of the Internet. She calls a screen capture a link, blames Staines for hacking her when she had an insecure website (it looks to be an ImageManager hack), and generally Barbra Streisands all over the place. That Staines comes out looking like the good guy in this case is a marvel.
The intrinsic problem here isn’t Perry’s goal to prevent the “Commercialization and Sexualisation of Childhood.” That is the intrinsic goal of all sane men and women. The problem is her methodology and clear lack of technical experience. Anyone with a modicum of understanding would see that web filtering is, in short, a form of censorship “for the children” and that proper parenting is the only answer to the call to keep porn out of our hard drives. It’s sad that she must be made the fool in this case, but it shows glaring gaps in experience and knowledge and exposes just how silly this entire effort really is.